Robert Parry: The Secret World of Robert Gates

The Secret World of Robert Gates

Robert Gates, George W. Bush's choice to
replace Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, is a trusted
figure within the Bush Family's inner circle, but there are
lingering questions about whether Gates is a trustworthy
public official.

The 63-year-old Gates has long faced
accusations of collaborating with Islamic extremists in
Iran, arming Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq, and
politicizing U.S. intelligence to conform with the desires
of policymakers - three key areas that relate to his future
job.

Gates skated past some of these controversies
during his 1991 confirmation hearings to be CIA director -
and the current Bush administration is seeking to slip Gates
through the congressional approval process again, this time
by pressing for a quick confirmation by the end of the year,
before the new Democratic-controlled Senate is seated.

If Bush's timetable is met, there will be no time for a
serious investigation into Gates's past.

Fifteen years
ago, Gates got a similar pass when leading Democrats agreed
to put "bipartisanship" ahead of careful oversight when
Gates was nominated for the CIA job by President George H.W.
Bush.

In 1991, despite doubts about Gates's honesty
over Iran-Contra and other scandals, the career intelligence
officer brushed aside accusations that he played secret
roles in arming both sides of the Iran-Iraq War. Since then,
however, documents have surfaced that raise new questions
about Gates's sweeping denials.

For instance, the
Russian government sent an intelligence report to a House
investigative task force in early 1993 stating that Gates
participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials in
1980 to delay release of 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran,
a move to benefit the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan
and George H.W. Bush.

"R[obert] Gates, at that time a
staffer of the National Security Council in the
administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director
George Bush also took part" in a meeting in Paris in October
1980, according to the Russian report, which meshed with
information from witnesses who have alleged Gates's
involvement in the Iranian gambit.

Once in office, the
Reagan administration did permit weapons to flow to Iran via
Israel. One of the planes carrying an arms shipment was shot
down over the Soviet Union on July 18, 1981, after straying
off course, but the incident drew little attention at the
time.

The arms flow continued, on and off, until 1986
when the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal broke. [For
details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege. For text of
the Russian report, click here. To view the actual U.S. embassy
cable that includes the Russian report, click here.]

Iraqgate Scandal

Gates also was implicated in a secret operation to funnel
military assistance to Iraq in the 1980s, as the Reagan
administration played off the two countries battling each
other in the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War.

Middle
Eastern witnesses alleged that Gates worked on the secret
Iraqi initiative, which included Saddam Hussein's
procurement of cluster bombs and chemicals used to produce
chemical weapons for the war against Iran.

Gates
denied those Iran-Iraq accusations in 1991 and the Senate
Intelligence Committee - then headed by Gates's personal
friend, Sen. David Boren, D-Oklahoma - failed to fully check
out the claims before recommending Gates for
confirmation.

However, four years later - in early
January 1995 - Howard Teicher, one of Reagan's National
Security Council officials, added more details about Gates's
alleged role in the Iraq shipments.

In a sworn
affidavit submitted in a Florida criminal case, Teicher
stated that the covert arming of Iraq dated back to spring
1982 when Iran had gained the upper hand in the war, leading
President Reagan to authorize a U.S. tilt toward Saddam
Hussein.

The effort to arm the Iraqis was
"spearheaded" by CIA Director William Casey and involved his
deputy, Robert Gates, according to Teicher's affidavit. "The
CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director
Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of
non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to
Iraq," Teicher wrote.

Ironically, that same pro-Iraq
initiative involved Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan's special
emissary to the Middle East. An infamous photograph from
1983 shows a smiling Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam
Hussein.

Teicher described Gates's role as far more
substantive than Rumsfeld's. "Under CIA Director [William]
Casey and Deputy Director Gates, the CIA authorized,
approved and assisted [Chilean arms dealer Carlos] Cardoen
in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other
munitions to Iraq," Teicher wrote.

Like the Russian
report, the Teicher affidavit has never been never seriously
examined. After Teicher submitted it to a federal court in
Miami, the affidavit was classified and then attacked by
Clinton administration prosecutors. They saw Teicher's
account as disruptive to their prosecution of a private
company, Teledyne Industries, and one of its salesmen, Ed
Johnson.

But the questions about Gates's participation
in dubious schemes involving hotspots such as Iran and Iraq
are relevant again today because they reflect on Gates's
judgment, his honesty and his relationship with two
countries at the top of U.S. military concerns.

About
140,000 U.S. troops are now bogged down in Iraq, 3 ½ years
after President George W. Bush ordered an invasion to remove
Saddam Hussein from power and eliminate his supposed WMD
stockpiles. One reason the United States knew that Hussein
once had those stockpiles was because the Reagan
administration helped him procure the material needed for
the WMD production in the 1980s.

The United States
also is facing down Iran's Islamic government over its
nuclear ambitions. Though Bush has so far emphasized
diplomatic pressure on Iran, he has pointedly left open the
possibility of a military option.

Political
Intelligence

Beyond the secret schemes to aid Iran
and Iraq in the 1980s, Gates also stands accused of playing
a central role in politicizing the CIA intelligence product,
tailoring it to fit the interests of his political
superiors, a legacy that some Gates critics say contributed
to the botched CIA's analysis of Iraqi WMD in 2002.

Before Gates's rapid rise through the CIA's ranks in the
1980s, the CIA's tradition was to zealously protect the
objectivity and scholarship of the intelligence. However,
during the Reagan administration, that ethos collapsed.

At Gates's confirmation hearings in 1991, former CIA
analysts, including renowned Kremlinologist Mel Goodman,
took the extraordinary step of coming out of the shadows to
accuse Gates of politicizing the intelligence while he was
chief of the analytical division and then deputy
director.

The former intelligence officers said the
ambitious Gates pressured the CIA's analytical division to
exaggerate the Soviet menace to fit the ideological
perspective of the Reagan administration. Analysts who took
a more nuanced view of Soviet power and Moscow's behavior in
the world faced pressure and career reprisals.

In
1981, Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl of the CIA's Soviet office
was the unfortunate analyst who was handed the assignment to
prepare an analysis on the Soviet Union's alleged support
and direction of international terrorism.

Contrary to
the desired White House take on Soviet-backed terrorism,
Ekedahl said the consensus of the intelligence community was
that the Soviets discouraged acts of terrorism by groups
getting support from Moscow for practical, not moral,
reasons.

"We agreed that the Soviets consistently
stated, publicly and privately, that they considered
international terrorist activities counterproductive and
advised groups they supported not to use such tactics,"
Ekedahl said. "We had hard evidence to support this
conclusion."

But Gates took the analysts to task,
accusing them of trying to "stick our finger in the policy
maker's eye," Ekedahl testified

Ekedahl said Gates,
dissatisfied with the terrorism assessment, joined in
rewriting the draft "to suggest greater Soviet support for
terrorism and the text was altered by pulling up from the
annex reports that overstated Soviet involvement."

In
his memoirs, From the Shadows, Gates denied politicizing the
CIA's intelligence product, though acknowledging that he was
aware of Casey's hostile reaction to the analysts'
disagreement with right-wing theories about Soviet-directed
terrorism.

Soon, the hammer fell on the analysts who
had prepared the Soviet-terrorism report. Ekedahl said many
analysts were "replaced by people new to the subject who
insisted on language emphasizing Soviet control of
international terrorist activities."

A donnybrook
ensued inside the U.S. intelligence community. Some senior
officials responsible for analysis pushed back against
Casey's dictates, warning that acts of politicization would
undermine the integrity of the process and risk policy
disasters in the future.

Working with Gates, Casey
also undertook a series of institutional changes that gave
him fuller control of the analytical process. Casey required
that drafts needed clearance from his office before they
could go out to other intelligence agencies.

Casey
appointed Gates to be director of the Directorate of
Intelligence [DI] and consolidated Gates's control over
analysis by also making him chairman of the National
Intelligence Council, another key analytical body.

"Casey and Gates used various management tactics to get the
line of intelligence they desired and to suppress unwanted
intelligence," Ekedahl said.

Career
Reprisals

With Gates using top-down management
techniques, CIA analysts sensitive to their career paths
intuitively grasped that they could rarely go wrong by
backing the "company line" and presenting the worst-case
scenario about Soviet capabilities and intentions, Ekedahl
and other CIA analysts said.

Largely outside public
view, the CIA's proud Soviet analytical office underwent a
purge of its most senior people. "Nearly every senior
analyst on Soviet foreign policy eventually left the Office
of Soviet Analysis," Goodman said.

Gates made clear he
intended to shake up the DI's culture, demanding greater
responsiveness to the needs of the White House and other
policymakers.

In a speech to the DI's analysts and
managers on Jan. 7, 1982, Gates berated the division for
producing shoddy analysis that administration officials
didn't find helpful.

Gates unveiled an 11-point
management plan to whip the DI into shape. His plan included
rotating division chiefs through one-year stints in policy
agencies and requiring CIA analysts to "refresh their
substantive knowledge and broaden their perspective" by
taking courses at Washington-area think tanks and
universities.

Gates declared that a new Production
Evaluation Staff would aggressively review their analytical
products and serve as his "junkyard dog."

Gates's
message was that the DI, which had long operated as an
"ivory tower" for academically oriented analysts committed
to an ethos of objectivity, would take on more of a
corporate culture with a product designed to fit the needs
of those up the ladder both inside and outside the CIA.

"It was a kind of chilling speech," recalled Peter Dickson,
an analyst who concentrated on proliferation issues. "One of
the things he wanted to do, he was going to shake up the DI.
He was going to read every paper that came out. What that
did was that everybody between the analyst and him had to
get involved in the paper to a greater extent because their
careers were going to be at stake."

A chief
Casey-Gates tactic for exerting tighter control over the
analysis was to express concern about "the editorial
process," Dickson said.

"You can jerk people around in
the editorial process and hide behind your editorial mandate
to intimidate people," Dickson said.

Gates soon was
salting the analytical division with his allies, a group of
managers who became known as the "Gates clones." Some of
those who rose with Gates were David Cohen, David Carey,
George Kolt, Jim Lynch, Winston Wiley, John Gannon and John
McLaughlin.

Though Dickson's area of expertise -
nuclear proliferation - was on the fringes of the
Reagan-Bush primary concerns, it ended up getting him into
trouble anyway. In 1983, he clashed with his superiors over
his conclusion that the Soviet Union was more committed to
controlling proliferation of nuclear weapons than the
administration wanted to hear.

When Dickson stood by
his evidence, he soon found himself facing accusations about
his psychological fitness and other pressures that
eventually caused him to leave the CIA.

Dickson also
was among the analysts who raised alarms about Pakistan's
development of nuclear weapons, another sore point because
the Reagan-Bush administration wanted Pakistan's assistance
in funneling weapons to Islamic fundamentalists fighting the
Soviets in Afghanistan.

One of the effects from the
exaggerated intelligence about Soviet power and intentions
was to make other potential risks - such as allowing
development of a nuclear bomb in the Islamic world or
training Islamic fundamentalists in techniques of sabotage -
paled in comparison.

While worst-case scenarios were
in order for the Soviet Union and other communist enemies,
best-case scenarios were the order of the day for
Reagan-Bush allies, including Osama bin Laden and other Arab
extremists rushing to Afghanistan to wage a holy war against
European invaders, in this case, the Russians.

As for
the Pakistani drive to get a nuclear bomb, the Reagan-Bush
administration turned to word games to avoid triggering
anti-proliferation penalties that otherwise would be imposed
on Pakistan.

"There was a distinction made to say that
the possession of the device is not the same as developing
it," Dickson told me. "They got into the argument that they
don't quite possess it yet because they haven't turned the
last screw into the warhead."

Finally, the
intelligence on the Pakistan Bomb grew too strong to
continue denying the reality. But the delay in confronting
Pakistan ultimately allowed the Muslim government in
Islamabad to produce nuclear weapons. Pakistani scientists
also shared their know-how with "rogue" states, such as
North Korea and Libya.

"The politicization that took
place during the Casey-Gates era is directly responsible for
the CIA's loss of its ethical compass and the erosion of its
credibility," Goodman told the Senate Intelligence Committee
in 1991. "The fact that the CIA missed the most important
historical development in its history - the collapse of the
Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself - is due in large
measure to the culture and process that Gates established in
his directorate."

Confirmation Battle

To
push through Gates's nomination to be CIA director in 1991,
the elder George Bush lined up solid Republican backing for
Gates and enough accommodating Democrats - particularly Sen.
Boren, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman.

In
his memoirs, Gates credited his friend, Boren, for clearing
away any obstacles. "David took it as a personal challenge
to get me confirmed," Gates wrote.

Part of running
interference for Gates included rejecting the testimony of
witnesses who implicated Gates in scandals beginning with
the alleged back-channel negotiations with Iran in 1980
through the arming of Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the
mid-1980s.

Ben-Menashe, who worked for Israeli military
intelligence from 1977-87, first fingered Gates as an
operative in the secret Iraq arms pipeline in August 1990
during an interview that I conducted with him for PBS
Frontline.

At the time, Ben-Menashe was in jail in New
York on charges of trying to sell cargo planes to Iran
(charges which were later dismissed). When the interview
took place, Gates was in a relatively obscure position, as
deputy national security adviser to President George H.W.
Bush and not yet a candidate for the top CIA job.

In
that interview and later under oath to Congress, Ben-Menashe
said Gates joined in meetings between Republicans and senior
Iranians in October 1980. Ben-Menashe said he also arranged
Gates's personal help in bringing a suitcase full of cash
into Miami in early 1981 to pay off some of the participants
in the hostage gambit.

Ben-Menashe also placed Gates
in a 1986 meeting with Chilean arms manufacturer Cardoen,
who allegedly was supplying cluster bombs and chemical
weapons to Saddam Hussein's army. Babayan, an Iranian exile
working with Iraq, also connected Gates to the Iraqi supply
lines and to Cardoen.

Gates has steadfastly denied
involvement in either the Iran-hostage caper or the Iraqgate
arms deals.

"I was accused on television and in the
print media by people I had never spoken to or met of
selling weapons to Iraq, or walking through Miami airport
with suitcases full of cash, of being with Bush in Paris in
October 1980 to meet with Iranians, and on and on," Gates
wrote in his memoirs. "The allegations of meetings with me
around the world were easily disproved for the committee by
my travel records, calendars, and countless witnesses."

But none of Gates's supposedly supportive evidence was ever
made public by either the Senate Intelligence Committee or
the later inquiries into either the Iran hostage initiative
or Iraqgate.

Not one of Gates's "countless witnesses"
who could vouch for Gates's whereabouts was identified.
Though Boren pledged publicly to have his investigators
question Babayan, they never did.

Perhaps most galling
for those of us who tried to assess Ben-Menashe's
credibility was the Intelligence Committee's failure to test
Ben-Menashe's claim that he met with Gates in Paramus, New
Jersey, on the afternoon of April 20, 1989.

The date
was pinned down by the fact that Ben-Menashe had been under
Customs surveillance in the morning. So it was a perfect
test for whether Ben-Menashe - or Gates - was lying.

When I first asked about this claim, congressional
investigators told me that Gates had a perfect alibi for
that day. They said Gates had been with Senator Boren at a
speech in Oklahoma. But when we checked that out, we
discovered that Gates's Oklahoma speech had been on April
19, a day earlier. Gates also had not been with Boren and
had returned to Washington by that evening.

So where
was Gates the next day? Could he have taken a quick trip to
northern New Jersey? Since senior White House national
security advisers keep detailed notes on their daily
meetings, it should have been easy for Boren's investigators
to interview someone who could vouch for Gates's whereabouts
on the afternoon of April 20.

But the committee chose
not to nail down an alibi for Gates. The committee said
further investigation wasn't needed because Gates denied
going to New Jersey and his personal calendar made no
reference to the trip.

But the investigators couldn't
tell me where Gates was that afternoon or with whom he may
have met. Essentially, the alibi came down to Gates's word.

Ironically, Boren's key aide who helped limit the
investigation of Gates was George Tenet, whose
behind-the-scenes maneuvering on Gates's behalf won the
personal appreciation of the senior George Bush. Tenet later
became President Bill Clinton's last CIA director and was
kept on in 2001 by the younger George Bush partly on his
father's advice.

Now, as the Bush Family grapples with
the disaster in Iraq, it is turning to an even more trusted
hand to run the Defense Department. The appointment of
Robert Gates suggests that the Bush Family is circling the
wagons to save the embattled presidency of George W.
Bush.

To determine whether Gates can be counted on to
do what's in the interest of the larger American public is
another question
altogether.

*************

Robert Parry broke many of the
Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press
and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of
the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also
available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost
History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project
Truth.'

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